U of T Mississauga students take to the streets

For the past six weeks, 10 teams of four young men and women each have been cruising through 10 Mississauga neighbourhoods. Inside each car, team members took turns snapping pictures of townhomes, buildings and malls, while their partners scribbled on a 12-page document, noting whether there were any syringes or broken beer bottles on the sidewalks. 

This was not a scene out of a Flashpoint episode, but an assignment given by U of T Mississauga Geography Professor Dana Wilson to her GGR354 students. 

The course (appropriately called The Young and the Restless: Geographies of Youth Development) ended last Friday when the ten student teams presented their findings to an audience of about eighty faculty, staff, fellow students, and members of Safe City Mississauga, the United Way Peel Region, City of Brampton, the Crown Attorneys Office for Peel Region and Peel Regional Police, among other organizations. 

The breadth of organizations in attendance was really amazing for myself and the students. It is so exciting to be able to link the students' research back to key community agencies working with youth, said Wilson, adding that some of the data obtained by students will be used in a research project examining social determinants of crime and safety. 

The half-credit course is based on the premise that socioeconomic conditions have lifelong repercussions on youth, as do home, school and neighbourhood settings. These repercussions may include completing school (or not), having sexual or violent encounters, and bearing children, said Wilson. 

As part of a term-long research project, GGR354 students had to scrutinize Google Earth images, pore over data from Statistics Canada's census and the Peel Data Centre's Service Delivery Area, and create a neighbourhood fact sheet summarizing key demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. 

Then they left the lecture hall, camera and pencil at the ready, and set off for the streets of Mississauga. Their objective? To evaluate how the neighbourhood's built and natural urban environment might support young people in their day-to-day activities.

What we found was that it's more likely for a youth to make better decisions when they grow up in an area with good socioeconomic conditions and the proper environment, said fourth-year Economics and Geography student Monica Khosravi. Her team, composed of Michelle Chow, Isis Iglesias, and Paul Hung, researched Markland Wood, a residential neighbourhood in Etobicoke that's surrounded by a country club. 

One of our recommendations was that more should be done to provide youths with indoor entertainment, said Khosravi. 

Other recommendations were not limited to socioeconomic factors. In researching Port Credit, the team of Patrycja Kolpak, Zlatko Morava, Victoria Polnelli, and Stephanie Warr, found a retaining wall on the waterfront that reached four to five feet directly above the water.

Kids were playing on the brink of that wall. They could easily fall into the water, so we recommended that a fence be put in place, said Warr, a fifth-year Geography and History student. 

Even though this is only the second year it's taught, GGR354 was in enough demand that Professor Wilson had to accommodate 40 students rather than the original 30. She says, however, she will have to cap to 30 again in the fall so that she can continue to offer students a high-quality learning experience.